The present invention relates to hand operated pick up devices and particularly to improved jaw construction for such devices.
There are a variety of known manually operated pick up devices used by, for example, government employees in picking up litter in public places such as parks, along road sides and the like. Many of these devices are of the spear type in which a piece of litter is impailed and subsequently removed in a litter bag. Additionally, several movable jaw-type pick up devices incorporating a combination of one movable jaw with a fixed jaw are known. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,264,028, issued to C. B. Rasmussen; 1,855,477, issued to F. R. Emery; and 1,271,149, issued to H. L. Ford as typical of movable jaw-type pick up devices.
With such prior art devices, typically the jaw members are constructed to perform a selected task which makes their universal use impractical. Thus, for example, the Rasmussen device employs rod-shaped jaws which are useful for picking up paper and cigarettes but can not operate efficiently in picking up larger objects such as cans, bottles and the like. The Emery device is specifically a weed puller using a duck billed jaw construction where the jaws are of equal width and do not open sufficiently to encompass a bottle or a can easily. The Ford device is particularly adapted for handling pieces of laundry and for that purpose includes jaw members of equal width and in one embodiment one of the jaws has a plurality of teeth.
The shortcomings of prior art devices represented by these patents lies in the inability for the jaws to universally handle a great variety of objects ranging from relatively small objects to larger objects such as bottles and cans as well as objects having a variety of shapes.